How ‘Blonde’ Makeup and Hairstyling Heads Jaime Leigh McIntosh & Tina Roesler Kerwin Dove Into Mountains of Images of Marilyn Monroe

There is a reason why adoration of Marilyn Monroe has endured decade after decade. You simply cannot take your eyes off of her. Andrew Dominik’s film, Blonde, plunges us into the pain, both private and public, that the Hollywood icon endured, though the film has received polarizing reactions since its release. Even if Blonde is often hard to watch, you cannot deny that Ana de Armas embodies Monroe with sympathy, intelligence, and love. She is aided by the extraordinary work of makeup department head Tina Roesler Kerwin and hair makeup head Jaime Leigh McIntosh.

Even though Monroe’s presence is larger than life, the duo had very different experiences with the actress, but working together really helped to shape a unified vision for Dominik’s film.

“I didn’t know much about her, to be honest,” McIntosh admitted early in our conversation. “I knew about how famous she was and how she died tragically too young. I had never seen her in a movie, and I’m not sure that I even knew she was a movie star. That’s how little I knew. She was just always there. I knew she was famous. It was a massive crash course for me. Because it’s not a biopic, I went off of the script and the book, and I knew what Andrew [Dominik] and Ana [de Armas] wanted. That was my tunnel vision, and I didn’t want to get too crazy down the rabbit hole about her actual life.”

Kerwin, on the other hand, was more familiar with Monroe’s work.

“I grew up with Marilyn in my life–as much as the average person,” she said. “Everyone knows what she looks like, but fewer people have seen their films. I grew up in Texas, and they would do double features of famous people. So they would feature a double bill of Marilyn or someone like Elvis. As far as knowing Marilyn and know the details of her makeup and her process, I didn’t know that. It didn’t take us long to recognize the responsibility that did know all those things.”

Finding the right shade of blonde was a task, but Kerwin and McIntosh admitted that they had to hit the ground running in terms of creating all of the looks for Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane. After all, the film, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, is titled Blonde.

“Going through the insane amount of reference, depending on the photo or light, that blonde seemed to change through time,” McIntosh said. “I was only able to have three blonde wigs. One was platinum and two of her more “iconic” blonde. I needed them to be sitting on the average of the spectrum of that color. Our wigmaker, Rob Pickens, used, I believe, multiple shades of blonde. There might have been six or seven. Once the wig was made and we saw Ana in full makeup, I went back and colored the wigs a little more to add more depth and dimension.”

Throughout out extensive conversation, I kept coming back to the fact that de Armas looked nothing like herself but I couldn’t “see” the hair and makeup designs. For a lot of stories about famous people, we can see the adjustments or audiences comment on “the most makeup” when it comes to awards. I kept telling these women how I was continually leaning into my television to try and find a seam or speck of prosthetics, but I only saw the embodiment of Monroe.

“The adjustments on Ana were sometimes so micro, it’s hard to describe how we corrected them,” Kerwin revealed. “There was a day where we had the monitor up with different images up. Jaime went to up to make an adjustment on Ana, but she couldn’t figure out why what she was doing wasn’t changing. It was because she was looking at the image of Marilyn. She saw something on Marilyn and went to touch up Ana. There were certainly times where it was happening to us too. Ana’s hair is really dark but Marilyn’s is very pale. In order for the shadow of Ana’s hair to not show through the wigs, after Jamie Lee prepped her hair and I put on three prosthetic pieces for a half-bald cap and then the wig went on top. The reason it’s a prosthetic as opposed a regular cap, it has more transparency and it would withhold us changing the wigs many times a day. If you didn’t see them, perfect. That’s the goal. We wanted the wig to look like it was coming out of her scalp, and the prosthetics gave her a blank scalp.”

Blonde really drives the narrative that Norma Jeane had to personify a character to be taken seriously in Hollywood, but people took advantage of her. She was always playing a part. Depending on who she was around on a set or home with one of her husbands, Norma Jeane would be comfortable as herself but she often had to put Marilyn on top of that in order to appease. The layering of actor on character on character is something McIntosh and Kerwin had to always consider.

“We are dealing with three characters,” Kerwin said. “We are dealing with Ana, Norma, and Marilyn. There were sometimes when the goal for Ana was to disappear, but she would bring humanity and the self to Norma Jeane. The lines between Marilyn and Norma Jeane were sometimes very blurred. The goal was to make it believable and subtle and leave room for Ana to show the soul of the character and not distract. In some moments, she looks like Marilyn but she looks like Norma. It was a blur for her.”

“The recreations were everything from full-on glam Marilyn to her at home as Norma Jeane,” McIntosh added. “There would be those times where it wouldn’t be a recreation of an image and being able to find our own Norma Jeane home alone with The Playwright or a normal day at the beach. She’s just being a real woman, and it was nice to incorporate into the glitz and glam.”

I even considered if Norma Jeane’s color palette would be different than Marilyn’s. Did Norma stay away from bright reds because Marilyn always wore them?

“It would be specific if it related to an image that we were recreating,” Kerwin said. “When we shot in black-and-white, it affected the choices for color palette and other things like her clothes. Norma Jeane was always underneath, but there was an expectation for what Marilyn would look like. Those are iconic images. The “at home” images aren’t as famous, but they do exist. We really had to follow the lead of Andrew to guide us to differentiate the versions of Ana and Norma Jeane and Marilyn. Sometimes, if she’s home, we don’t know if she’s going to work or if she just came back, and she would be wearing makeup. That was important too, because if I pulled the makeup back too far, then Ana would come through. It was tricky to find the level, especially in the eye makeup.”

McIntosh recalled how difficult the shoot was because of how much time Blonde covers and how many looks needed to be created. There were days when de Armas would be shooting a famous image from a movie but then she might be at home with The Playwright or the Ex-Athlete.

“The schedule was insane,” she said. “It’s always tight, but Blonde was beyond. My example of how tight it was is, for continuity, there are times in a day where I change a wig because the next scene is related to a scene we shot a few days ago. I got the wig changes down to seven minutes. There were some occasions where I was told there wasn’t that time. It would freak me out, but I had to put trust into Andrew. Not only are we working as quickly as we can, but a lot of those looks have ten minutes of preparation from a change. It might have been the first time we had the look together. Out job was hard, but Ana having to perform the ups and downs… it’s amazing.”

“What was really helpful before shooting was a day where we shot some of the stills for the transition to Marilyn on the magazine covers,” Kerwin added. “On that one day, we changed her 36 times. It was a crash course on the differences between these three women. I had never met Ana before that. It was a quick learning curve in terms of where to shadow, what lipsticks not to use, and what worked. And then we started shooting. As hard as that day was, we learned a lot of things that day. It was moving train every single day. The movies were playing on the TV in the trailer, and the pictures we plastered all over the walls.”

“There were no images in the film where they face replaced Ana onto Marilyn. Even the pictures her mother is looking at of Norma Jeane… they are all full photoshoots that we needed to create for those images,” McIntosh clarified.

The final section of Blonde is traumatic because it puts into perspective how alone Marilyn felt in her final days. McIntosh revealed to me that they shot the final scene in Monroe’s actual home, and being in the space was surreal for both her and Kerwin.

“When we were shooting a lot of things in that house, it was a pretty closed set,” McIntosh said. “We got Ana ready, but we wouldn’t see her for take after take. It was very private. Those were my memories of it. It felt a little intrusive to be in that space, but I felt fortunate to be there.”

“It’s interesting, because we shot a lot of practical locations from her life,” Kerwin said. “We shot in her real spaces like the duplex she lived in with her mom or at the orphanage. We felt Marilyn was with us, and we felt when she was unhappy with us. The house where she passed away in had a interesting feeling. It’s not a very big house, and it’s a beautiful space. We were grateful to be there, but we were completely aware that that space was entirely her. You can’t not feel a level of respect and reverence to the entire situation.”

Blonde is available to stream on Netflix.